"Happy Holidays and Season's
Greetings to you". Or should I
be more specific by greeting you with "Merry Christmas", instead? After all, it
is December the 24th as I write this. Try saying Happy Holiday to someone
as you wish them a nice Fourth of July weekend and watch their reaction. Or how
about saying Season's Greetings during Holy Week? Both July 4th and
Easter are
holidays, too, after all, aren't they? Wouldn't the same apply to
Labor Day and Memorial Day? Happy Holidays? Are we really that afraid these days
of invoking religiosity, no matter how subtle the implication might be, in our greetings
to one another? And just what do Santa Claus and Christmas trees have to do with
Christianity, anyhow? Absolutely nothing at all, I might add. When someone says
to me: "Let's keep Christ in Christmas," I simply reply with: "Then let's
keep hallowed in Hallowe'en."

So, why are we saying
preparedness in lieu of our prior term preparation? Our word
preparation has served us well during centuries past, up until about 15
years ago. And has this word suffered the same fate that well-being did
with the now ubiquitous term wellness? Can't wellness also mean
the comparison and in-depth study of our world's multitudinous wells, the
kind that we draw water from?

GENDER AND SEX (in language)

Granted that languages, like all
biological forms on our planet, evolve and change throughout Time's inevitable
forward march. But why all of this apparent hypersensitivity over the terms we
use, or used to use? Since our English language lacks grammatical gender and
number for the most part, I think that it is safe to say that English is quite a
neuter language, devoid of attaching gender to inanimate objects as is
often so characteristic of the Romance languages, along with many others
worldwide.

Most native English-speakers are now
become accustomed to saying Chair instead of Chairwoman so as not
to indicate to the listener the actual sex of the person holding that
professional position. How odd that actually giving the listener more
information about the person (i.e., his or her biological sex as being either
male or female) should cause such alarm! Many misconstrue the addition of -woman
as in Chairwoman with being sexist by divulging to the listener
such added, perhaps unnecessary information. Unsurprisingly however, it is to the speaker's and
listener's mutual advantages, in this particular case, to add -woman to
the word, for it enlightens us more so. So what is "sexist" about this?
Maybe a particular man might prefer having a male Chairman, instead of
a female supervisor. The addition of -woman,instead of using the sexless
Chairperson, is now become an asset to the listener, not a discredit to
anyone. Yet women commonly address one another today as guys, as in "See
you guys later"! What if a man were to bid farewell to a group of men with
gals, as in "See you gals later". Mightn't this really
be what sexism is all about in language(s)? How about saying fisherwoman? Don't you now have
another added, more specific bit of information about this particular person who fishes?

THE SANDHI VARIATION AND LANGUAGE
VIRUSES

So, whatcha doing? One could
reply with I dunno. You know, I'm feeling kinda tired. What I'm
gonna do is to take a nap.

These italicized words, or their
combinations thereof, are undergoing the sandhi variation. For example,
whatcha really represents the three-word combinatory value of "What are
you...?". Much of this phenomena is based on what I call a "natural lazy
tendency" on the part of native speakers in all languages. This variation
is a morphophonological modification of grammatical forms which have
been juxtaposed (or squished, rather) over one another. In essence, this
somewhat limited definition could include English's plentitude of contractions,
as in do + not = don't, in French je + ai = j'ai (I
have) or the Spanish language's de + el = del (of or from the).
These contractions remain grammatically "correct" or unblemished. But it is the
gonna or especially C'ive (for "Can I have") that really
seem to be the most troubling for foreigners learning to understand the English
of our common, everyday vernacular speech. Oh! I just used the word foreigner,
our latest lexical taboo! For it is now become world languages instead
of foreign languages or, better yet, the all inclusive generic
language arts. How interesting....

Now language viruses are a
relatively recent occurrence involving, in general, the youth or young speakers
of any given language. These are words that generally have no specific
communicative function whatsoever, as in "She's like really upset about that". In
this sentence, the word like transmits no meaning or cognitive conveyance,
at all. Basically, this word like is purely
meaningless, devoid of any context whatsoever.

Another example of a language virus
is the word all, as in "I'm all 'Yeah, that's right'. Whatever you
say." Again, here the word all signifies nothing. These airless terms
don't even fulfill the needed function of being a "filler", or serve
as a communicative bridge between ideas, as in Uh or
Um, as when one is pausing to think of what to say next. Sometimes words,
oftentimes verbs, take on a transpositional quality about them, as in the term
goes meaning says: "I said 'Hi' and she goes 'Hello' back".
So, just where is she going, anyhow?

Another virus-infected word,
though used much more commonly during the 1970s, is OK (also spelled
Okay), as in: "He's...OK...really hot on this whole idea." Though
OK has found international meaning and appeal, in the previous example
given, OK lacks any sensible connotation. The listener is left with
nothing by that word, is suspended senseless. These are our non-biological,
non-computer viruses of our daily discourse in English.

WAR OF THE WORDS

Now, much of our
news of late, especially since the tragic aviation attacks against the United
States on September 11, 2001, has revolved around our War on Terror! But if
there were really to be a war on terror, wouldn't this intend to ban such works of terror
like Stephen King's The Stand or Carrie? or Alfred Hitchcock's
films Psycho (1960) or The Birds (1963)? These, along what a
zillion other book and movies of the macabre genre, involve terror:
a deliberate attempt to frighten the reading or cinéma-going public for
entertainment value only. What they
really mean to say in the media is the war on terrorism, not a war
on terror.
King and Hitchcock are not to be put on trial, are they? It is the terrorists
who are to be sought out, not entertaining works of true terror like John
Carpenter's ground-breaking movie masterpiece Halloween (1978) or Rod
Serling's The Monsterson Maple Street in his 1960 episode of his
perennial popular television series The Twilight Zone.